This past week I began a new director-to-director interview series on 2AMt. Here is the first profile (Meet Michael Leeds), just in case you missed it. The objective of this series is twofold: (1) to create more dialogue among directors (2) to provide more insight into current directing practices. Profiles...
While following the New Play Convening at Arena Stage in January, I was struck by a comment made about directors in relation to the supply/demand debate. The comment went something like this: directors have lacked opportunities to hone their craft and so have started companies in order to remedy this,...
Prepping a Shakespeare text for performance requires careful negotiation from the outset. As a director and voice and text consultant on productions, I work wearing a couple of dramaturgical hats. I’m mindful, firstly, of the practical aspects surrounding the task: proposed running time, budgetary constraints, cast size and casting choices...
In Portland, or so they say, you can put a bird on it, and call it art. The Fertile Ground new works festival isn’t exactly as the creators of Portlandia posit — I saw no clowns or artistic birds last weekend — but the 11-day explosion of playwriting, acting, dancing and...
Passed around Twitter feeds, posted on Facebook walls: last week’s Onion joke article. Funny, but with a twinge of ouch—not because I have ever wanted to tell the story of my life onstage, but because at different times I have written, directed, and produced non-confessional one-actor plays. Doing so, if anyone is...
I don’t think anything that’s really creative can be done without danger or risk. — Julie Taymor I’m not here to judge the merits of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. I haven’t seen the play, I’ve only heard one less-than-thrilling song. But I do know the people involved are capable...
In the past twelve months, I have been a candidate in several searches for a new artistic director, and in three cases, I have been one of the last two or three standing. These experiences – these cover letters, interviews, meetings, discussions and also the crushing disappointments of that...
Collation line. Apparatus. Strip of terror. Whatever you call it, it’s that somewhat inscrutable line or two of apparently Enigma code between the text and the annotations, particularly in a modern edition of, say, Shakespeare. It might seem irrelevant or irretrievably geeky, but there are all kinds of important, dramatically...